KANSAS CITY, Kan. -- Kevin Harvick and crew chief Gil Martin never considered themselves out of the Chase for the Sprint Cup, but that might have been more talk than proof until Sunday at Kansas Speedway.

"We are just having fun," Harvick said. "Everybody wrote us off at the beginning of the year, especially from a media standpoint. We are just going to go do our thing and hopefully keep doing it quietly and have fun at it."

But the series heads to Charlotte Motor Speedway, where Harvick won in May, this weekend.

"We've just got to keep doing what we did today to be a contender," said team owner Richard Childress. "I don't think top-10s will win a championship when you're racing Jimmie Johnson and the group of guys that's up there.

"We've been there before, and hopefully this time we can pull it off."

Childress has not won a title since Dale Earnhardt in 1994 -- 19 years ago.

If he wins one with Harvick, it will have to be this year as Harvick will leave after this season for Stewart-Haas Racing.

"It's business, but it's also you have a sense of pride, and your ego just has a hard time taking the fact that you did it like everybody else," Harvick said.

"That's what we talked about. You don't want to do it like everybody else. You want to go out with a sense of success and (that) everything has gone well."

Harvick has two wins on 1.5-mile tracks this year. The other 1.5-mile races have been won by Joe Gibbs Racing drivers Kenseth and Kyle Busch. Three of the final six races are on 1.5-mile tracks.

"There's no way you can ever consider yourself out of it," said Harvick crew chief Gil Martin. "The first race of the year at Daytona, I think we came out of there 43rd, and in 10 weeks we were back up to around 10th or 11th, so we made up a lot of ground, not only just by running well."

With Talladega two weeks away -- and Harvick strong on restrictor-plate tracks -- there are several opportunities that Harvick and Martin see as winning possibilities.

"You've still got Talladega and Martinsville that everybody considers to be tracks that shake everything up, but today we were at what everybody considers to be a non-eventful mile-and-a-half, and you saw what happened today," Martin said.

"So there's a lot of things that can happen in the next few races, and we're just going to have to capitalize on them. But by no means do I think we're out of it."